Big Beat Steve

I'm not familiar with these labels but broadly know who Sonny Lester was (as a producer). So I felt the need to read up on him online now and see that he has an entry dedicated to him on a site named "spaceagepop". 😉 So maybe this (also) explains that (in terms of immediate Soul jazz credentials with the harder-core jazz fraternity)??

Brief but very interesting, thanks Allen ... I marked and copied the entire text (plus the Randall's Island photo of Clyde Hart) into a Word file for permanent future reference. No popups there, but of course I'll have to pull the sound samples one by one from my collection.

Digging this up now ... I had bookmarked the above site on a previous PC of mine and remembering the valuable info it contained, I now found a printout of a few excerpts from that site in my files. But trying to access the site it seems it has gone belly up. Or did I overlook something? Does anyone know if that site is really dead ot if its contents maybe have migrated to a different site under a totally different link? Thanks in advance.

OK, so the "blame" is on them ... 😄

Somehow it looks like Riverside contracted an artist who was more used to painting pics of down-home country blues artists for the cover artwork of that "Portait of Wes" LP.

Typo correction: ... that the additional tracks that are on one tape only come from a second set that was played

Thanks for your comments. I was just puzzled that the fact that there are two tapes in circulation where one tape has additional tracks (beyond the idential tracks on both tapes) would necessarily mean that there were two sets played. So if I got you right you presume that the additional tracks that are one tape only come from a second set that was payed?

A question from the sideline: But if it is a "2nd set", could it have been the "same tape"? Surely they never did play two sets (with the same set list of tunes) in EXACTLY the same way, note for note? So either it is the same tape that so far was incomplete and now has been expanded, or it was a second set and therefore is a differnet tape now.

Thanks for your diligent research, Niko. So I checked the two Down Beat issues close to the 10 Feb. 1955 recording date of the Nat Pierce session for WODDY HERMAN now. But nothing precise ... The 9 Feb. 1955 issue says Woody Herman had just made a private dance date at the Sheraton Hotel in Detroit. Nothing about tour data in the "Band routes" sections at all. The 23 Feb. issue states he was in the Ohio area in the second half of January. The 9 March issue reports that "Woody Herman broke several attendance marks on Saturday night at the Statler" but does not say which Saturday exactly . The 23 March issue says "Dick Jurgens succeeded Woody Herman at the Cafe Rouge of the Hotel Statler" (New York) (but none of these reports about New Yokr happenings state if the residence of the Herman band extended back into early February). Anyway, this is at least an indication that the orchestra was at the East Coast during that period.

10 February 1955. The Down Beat issues of 26 January and 9 February 1955 did not list any tour activities of the Stan Kenton band, neither in the "Band Routes" (tour data) section nor anywhere else.

Bruyninckx gives New York as the recording location.

The above Pierce/Powell compilation was the source of the ARS (American Record Society) release that I mentioned earlier in the discussion of the items that Mosaic saw fit to omit from the Vanguard sets. The contents are exactly the same. It is indeed hard to imagine why the Nat Pierce session would not have fitted the bill of what AT ITS CORE was a 50s MAINSTREAM Swing set that stlyistically did look beyond Swing-era swing-style jazz (as the compilers at Mosaic must have been aware - unless they had exceedingly conservative tastes).

Sure (though - like other PD labels - they do seem to remain within the European copyright cutoff dates too), yet they seemed to have had the graces of Zweitausendeins where this series was sold back in the day. And at a secondhand price of 1 EUR I really have no qualms. But rest assured - others will blast AVID (and the like) in the same manner.

This Urbie Green 10-incher (VRS-8010/Amadeo AVRS 7003) has accompanied my collecting days ever since I found a copy at a fleamarket about 40 years (or more) ago. In the meantime I've upgraded twice at very affordable prices (to originals with somewhat better covers), sold the first and have the second bought now on sale in my fleamarket jazz LP box. So visibly that LP must have sold decently back in the day. That Avid compilation might have been a option for those who do not already have most of the contents in other formats; I have his Vanguard LP also on CD now (bought for 1 EUR at a clearout sale 2 years ago - at that price nothing witll do any harm and anythimg can go into the car player as a last resort - and fidelity is not bad at all IMO): https://www.discogs.com/de/release/15513971-Vic-Dickenson-Urbie-Green-Slidin-Swing

I guess most of the ones ignored (for whatever reason ) by Mosaic would fit into a "Modernism at Vanguard" box set (Kühn, Elliott, Pierce, Bright, Most, Brown a.o.). But that would be quite a hodgepodge (regardless of who would reissue them that way), and therefore unlikely. Personally, that doesn't bothers me unduly. I have almost all of them on vinyl (missing only the Ronnell Bright so far).